so2 – rhizomatic architecture

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

What’s particularly hard to swallow about this book is that Jaynes goes far to argue for undermining not only how we know ourselves but also how we are to account for what we are doing. One of the basic rubrics of science and philosophy is our concept of consciousness, as a container for our individuality and our ability to comprehend/experience. To question consciousness itself in the form that we believe it comes in, in the method by which we determine ourselves is to question the very possible ordering of how we coexist today. This isn’t to say that our conception of ourselves isn’t natural, or that consciousness itself isn’t natural, but that is to say that we don’t have to live as we do or be how we are.

When one argues for the dissolution of such a basic structural artifact, it becomes terribly difficult for people to follow in how to evaluate that argument. Many of the comments around this book reflect both how clear and powerful Jaynes is in setting up his argument, but also many of the comments display a complete lack of trust in his argument because they do not see a deeper underlying appraisal of how to evaluate what he says.

Its true that in a big way, his ideas are unfalsifiable. We can’t disprove them. We can’t do EEG readings on people that were alive many generations ago. We only have textual analysises. And we can’t reproduce the results of the past either because it’s unethical or we have become so tainted with our own evaluations of consciousness that such “experimentation” would be impossible to reproduce in a pure clinical environment. In this sense, what Jayne is doing isn’t science, even if he is coming from a scientific background. What he is doing is doxa, or opinion. And science really only likes questions that it can readily answer… meaning that it only poses questions it can answer, in general, questions that do not shake things up too badly so that we lose our ability to even know if a question has or has not been answered.

What I like especially about this book is that Jayne takes us to a far away place. He throws his thesis out there, marks it as a point for us to follow. In doing so, he begs us to loosen our sense of what we take to be knowledge and consider the reality that our given ideas of ourselves limit how we even frame the things we are desirous to study. The objects of knowledge are objects created by what we think we know. But what is the proper basis for authority?

This is one of the most frightening implications of what he says. There is no proper basis. All authority is self referential. The most rigid of us (or unimaginative) would consider that he makes no sense, because sense making requires certain correlations in our thinking that are made unavailable if we are to consider what he says as being actual. His chapter in hypnosis is most telling. If we consider what he says to be true: that different hypnotic experiments parrot the ideas of what the hypnotized subjects thought was hypnosis then it frighteningly follows that our own ideas of what is true inexorably alters what we believe can be true… which means a rejection of everything which cannot follow the ideas we have to be given.

I don’t want to make a review of this book too long. I do want to point out that consciousness and language today can be studied under the rubric of cognitive linguistics. And the idea that metaphors are the basic mode of understanding does follow many contemporaneous thinkers today, even if it was less compellingly so when he wrote this book. So we seem to be catching up to him, although we will wonder about the possibility of an awareness that isn’t as discrete and individualized as the consciousness he describes being so in past humankind. Matching his idea to the contours of what we know to be history (as a series of events) isn’t proof of truth, but it does add his reasoning among everything else… including the question as to what is the proper authority of how we should know things.

For me, the key to what seems to be confusion in reading Jaynes’ work comes from the position of understanding as metaphor. As anything can be metaphorized, so can any position be created as a justified reality. This goes against science’s desire for rigor, that to know the universe means its mathematical formulation… even though mathematicians themselves may disagree as to what are ultimately valid constructs by which understanding can extend, and those extensions may be incomplete in the sense that they cannot be translatable to the daily experiential lived positions we take for granted. For example, the birth of life explained by biology does not follow our lived experience of life among the living… not only to say that while someone who maybe an interbehaviorial psychologist or a physicist may claim that their field can explain reality, it can never justify why one twin may become a psychologist and the other a strict mormon or any other ridiculously constrained situation… for such “explanations” always require endless deferral into other regimes which can then mirror the movement as an originary “cause”. We can talk about this as a discursive form of Hume’s take down of causation.

In other words, formal understanding explained without content can never justify particular contents and particular understandings even as understanding exploded into such a general paradigm may lead to any number of contingencies that we may find to be without cause. The confusion has to do with description or prescription. Is science (or any collection of relations that constitute a system) only to describe or is it to prescribe?

For Jayne, science rests wholly on the former, and for that I applaud his efforts. We may not like what we read, but if we find that we cannot take sense of it, then the failure is wholly on our part. What is so objectionable that how we conceive of ourselves today is wholly contingent on a very basic conception of how we fit in with one another? Are we so into our set ideas of social groups that we cannot accept what we call as madness as a more general position of what we call sanity as it insists on itself for-itself?

In the end though, how one reader, you or I, apprehend this work, or any other work, is a very personal question. But I find his intensity and clarity to be rare among thinkers. At the end of the day though, who knows? We might as well look into it. And if he inspires it, so all the better it must be.

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